Welcome to Microsoft Mechanics coming up on today's show we'll take a look at the
latest tool updates for administering Office 365 including the new simplified
portal design an upcoming reporting capabilities, updates to Office 365 admin
app for phones and our new PowerShell site for top tasks as well sample
scripts for automation
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today by Lawrence Chiu. Welcome. Thank you. So what's new for Office 365 admins?
So there's a lot of new and exciting enhancements coming to the tools for
managing Office 365. First let's take a look at where we came from. Ok. So this is
the current admin center and as you can see we added more capability as we added
more capability became more difficult for some admins to find the common tasks
and scenarios this is especially noticeable on the left nav where we continue to add more
features and functionality. Right so this as a service has lots of innovations
we've listened to the feedback that we're getting from Office 365 admins were
making the navigation much more intuitive right? Right and that's why we
launched the new admin Center preview so with here where we're kind of surfacing
it making more intuitive so that admins can easily access the most common tasks
and scenarios that they do daily or weekly so for example I needed to reset a password
for one of my users. All they need to do is navigate over to the user section
click on reset password type in the user's name in this case it's Alex Darrow
Click on Alex Darrow and reset and that's it I had never left the home page at all. You're
on the home page in the past you had to go back into the user Center click on
Alex select him then reset password then type the password. So you've just saved quite a
few clicks right? Correct making it much simpler for users. What else have you done?
We've also simplified the way you can add a user and purchase a license right
in the same flow. For example imagine I had a new user just joining the company
so I click on Add User I type in their name and as you can see as I scroll
down there is a tool that pops up and says hey you need to purchase a new
subscription by clicking on save, not only did I provision a new user, I
purchased an Office 365 license as well. Right, in the past you would have had to
go back, you'd have tried to provision the user then you would have been informed that
you're out of licenses and you'd have to go back and purchase licenses then go
back into the user and add that license to the users. So again I've just saved a ton
clicks just to do that in one flow. Correct this subtle change makes the whole process of
providing tools for users to be productive much easer. These are just
two examples of some of the changes that we've made
we've also added the ability for you to quickly view your monthly bill as well
as edit your payment methods and this is just the start
this is a preview there are more enhancements coming. Great I know we've
done a lot of work in terms of reporting so why don't you show us what's new there. Yes so we've
heard from from our users the need for greater insights and this is coming to
the Office 365 Administrator. Let's take a look. Let me give you a sneak peek at what we're
doing so this is the Office 365 usage dashboard. What this enables you to see
at a high level across your tenant is how your users are using Office 365 we show you
trend information across a given period of time as well as key metrics across
all the different Office 365 services for example if I want to know what type
of email activity that my users are doing I can quickly take a glance at the
tile and see in this example I 5000 emails being sent or received across my
tenant if I want deeper information I just simply click on the tile and I'm
taken into a detailed user report where I have trend information about the
activity across the given period and if I need user details I can dive right in
and see the individual users how many emails they sent, read or received and what's
more, you have the ability now to export all your data, process it in Excel and
and do more reports if you need it and as more services become available they'll
be added to the Office 365 usage dashboard. And at Ignite, we actually gave it an
early look, a preview of Power BI showing some of the state as well. Right
if you need more advanced analytics coming soon to Office 365 is the content
pack for Power BI. What that enables you to do is get richer insights into how your
users are using Office 365 by combining your Office 365 usage data with your
organization's user information. Do you have it running? Yes let me give you a sneak peak. So
this is the dashboard that you'll see this is an example and what you can do
with with the Office 365 content pack for Power BI is pivot on attributes
such as department, for example. Here I can see a high-level look at how the
activities trending across time. By clicking on the tile I'm brought into
richer insights. I can see how each department is adopting Office 365. What
this empowers you to do is to increase adoption by adjusting adoption plans if needed
and maximizing your return on investment. Yeah, it's something a lot of people have been asking for but also
beyond what just in the browser, you've done a lot of great work on phones and really being able to
check on this on the go right? With the Office 365 Admin app you can manage your
users, you can view your service health, check messages on message center as well
as contact support. We've continuously innovated on the Office 365 and we are
constantly bringing new innovations to the app including push notifications so
now you're able to select the services that you want notifications from and
this is simply done. Click select the main menu, tap on settings, tapping on
notifications and there you are you have your suite of services that you can
select your push notifications from and this is important because if you're in
Exchange Admin you may not want to be notified by SharePoint Services incidents
and more. Right, Right.
Coming soon you have the ability to receive push notifications from message
center as well and this is especially important if we need to
notify you of an issue that you have to fix on-prem. In addition to all the things that
you saw here in the browser in the new portal redesign and all the reporting in
the app we've also done a lot of work in terms of PowerShell and automation right? That's
right we just recently launched powershell.office.com and what this is a
website resource that's great for admins new to PowerShell. It quickly tells you
what and why you would use PowerShell and when. It enables you to get started
quickly gives you the top 20 common scenarios that you would use PowerShell
for as well sample scripts so you can quickly get started right away. That's
really great if you're kind of getting into PowerShell or beginning that but if
you're really an advanced user or fancy yourself as a more advanced PowerShell
user we've also launched in August another project around IT pro
deployments scripting for Office 2016
I think a lot of people find very useful for example things like being able to
copy over GPO settings from the 2013 install. One of the more recent updates
we've also given the ability to create your own configuration XML file or maybe
reverse engineer the existing install and all of that is actually on GitHub
so you can go to the Office blog and find the links to that or go GitHub and actually
just start using this PowerShell scripts samples. Beyond all of the stuff where do
I get started if I want to learn more about this?
The new Office 365 admin center is in preview today so it will continue to
evolve with more and more capability when it becomes available for your tenant
you simply need to enable it right from the UI the other thing download the
Office 365 Admin App it's invaluable and it's available for iOS Android and
Windows Phone. And of course the PowerShell resources that we just showed
you already public now both the GitHub project and powershell.office.com
You know all of these great things are coming for admins and of course you can
stay up to date with everything news and Office 365 on Wednesdays or as news
breaks with Microsoft Mechanics. Thank you for watching and goodbye for now.